Well, although I generally don’t do plugs I stepped out of my norm in my last post to advertise Think Visibility 2 so it seems only fair to let you know how it went.
Firstly a real well done to The Hodge for organising such a fantastic event. The quality of speaker and diversity in the talks made for a really interesting day. My only wish was that there would have been more time and more speakers. Not a criticism really but by the time you have watched one or two talks you realise you could sit there all day and absorb information from the guys that are up there doing their stuff.
I was really only there to help out however the actual delegates all seemed to be getting on well and networking with each other. It was a little sad watching a room full of grown ups (mainly men) sitting ‘playing’ on their iPhones ‘Tweeting’ through the entire thing but that is kind of expected given the nature of the event. This, however, was cleverly exploited when the delegates were asked to ‘Tweet’ in questions for the ‘panel show’ which amused everyone around the half way mark.
My personal favourite talk was on usability studies using eye tracking techniques to record the unconscious interest of the brain. It kind of confirmed that amazons site design is rubbish and that you can design sites to hide content you don’t want the user to red right in the middle of the screen. There were also numerous WordPress talks which proved interesting indeed. Joost De Valk for one, although not the most inspirational speaker, had some good ideas to talk about and plans for great things to come.
To conclude briefly a great time was had by all, friends were made, business cards exchanged and geeky (and some non geeky) brains were picked. So thanks once again to Dom for organising the event and all the speakers/delegates for making it such a good event. I imagine everyone is now really looking forward (and saving up for) Think Visibility 3 which I beleive is in March 2010 (keep an eye on The Hodges site for more info).
Thanks for the review, which part of my speech wasn’t inspirational to you / could I have improved on?
Hi, thanks for the comment. I don’t get many
I thought your talks content was very good but the second half of the slides and verbal presentation maybe a little dry. I’m not suggesting that I would have done any better but I wasn’t getting the involuntary urge to go and grab a copy of one of your new plugins. However I have just had another look through the presentation on your site and the visual queues seem to all be in place so the message got across.
Please don’t feel my post singled you out, it merely marked your talk as one of the more memorable (in a good way). I actually related to it very well being a ‘bit’ of a WordPress fan and plugin writer myself. I did actually subscribe to your RSS feed after the talk regardless
I personally don’t get the traffic for caching and would disagree with your comment about having a caching plugin working from the start. I find caching plugins cause no end of conflicts with others (such as content restriction plugins) so I tend to wait until the last possible moment to implement them. Needless to say I have yet to get one going yet. However my main problem with them is I often debug clients sites that are showing random errors in the content which prove impossible to debug because of the nature of caching.
Looking forward to seeing the thing we aren’t allowed to mention despite it being a bit beyond me in geekery usage
thanks
Sean